arXiv Computation and Language

RAG Collapse: LLM Responses Collapse When Retrieved Documents Are Self-Authored

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 11

Probing for Knowledge Attribution in Large Language Models

The paper introduces a method for identifying the dominant knowledge source behind large language model (LLM) outputs, distinguishing between faithfulness violations (misuse of provided context) and factuality violations (errors in internal knowledge). A simple linear probe trained on hidden representations can reliably classify this source, and the authors present AttriWiki, a self‑supervised pipeline that generates labeled training data by prompting models to recall withheld entities or read them from context. Probes trained on AttriWiki achieve high Macro‑F1 scores across several models and datasets, generalize zero‑shot to a benchmark, and show that attribution mismatches can increase error rates by up to 70%. "whyItMatters":"The study demonstrates that knowing the source of an LLM’s answer is crucial for effective mitigation of hallucinations, as attribution mismatches significantly raise error rates."

By Ivo Brink, Alexander Boer, Dennis Ulmer
arXiv AI
Sep 1

Look It Up: Analysing Internal Web Search Capabilities of Modern LLMs

The paper evaluates how modern large language models use internal web search to answer factual questions. Using 783 static queries and 288 dynamic queries, the authors find that enabling retrieval improves accuracy on static questions but hurts confidence calibration. On dynamic queries, models often retrieve but still achieve less than 70% accuracy, mainly due to poor query formulation and source selection, indicating that internal web search works better as a quick verification tool than a full information‑retrieval system.

By Sahil Kale
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 1

Agent Zero Memory: Provenance-Aware Long-Term Memory for LLM Agents

Agent Zero Memory is a provenance‑aware long‑term memory system for large language model agents that distills user interactions into three parallel memory structures: an episodic timeline, an associative entity‑event knowledge graph, and a semantic, citation‑locked hierarchical documentary memory. Retrieval is performed via an intent gate, source router, and concurrent searches across the three systems, producing integrated, cited answers that exclude fabrication and require evidence the reader has opened. The system achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance on LongMemEval (95.60%) and LoCoMo (93.60%) while offering a favorable accuracy‑cost‑latency trade‑off across multiple backbone LLMs.

By Ming Wu, Pengyuan Zhu